Opera and dance have a long history as bedfellows, though since the late nineteenth century they have been more or less estranged. From time to time, however, the choreographer Mark Morris has orchestrated a rapprochement. Two such examples appear on a double bill with the Mark Morris Music Ensemble at BAM, March 15-19. In “Dido and Aeneas,” by Henry Purcell, the more dancey of the two, the mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe sings from the pit about the grief of the Queen of Carthage and the trickery of her mortal enemy, a saucy sorceress. Onstage, the dancer Laurel Lynch, of the Mark Morris Dance Group, embodies both characters, ricocheting between dignity and raunchiness. There are no actual dancers in Morris’s staging of Benjamin Britten’s Noh-inspired “Curlew River,” but that doesn’t mean there is no choreography. Rather, it’s the singers who move, barefoot, evoking religious processions, a beating heart, and a ship at full sail.

Thank goodness for the French, who have always appreciated the works of Merce Cunningham, sometimes more than his own countrymen. Now, almost a decade after his death, they are doing their part to preserve his legacy. On April 4-9, the Angers-based Compagnie CNDC—led by the longtime Cunningham dancer Robert Swinston—presents a triple bill at the Joyce which includes two early works, “Place” and “How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run,” both from the sixties, the decade that put Cunningham on the map. “Place” is like a surrealistic, slightly dystopian dream, while “How to Pass,” set to a series of pithy stories by John Cage, is Cunningham at his most playful. Both dances are driven by the bracing energy that characterizes most of Cunningham’s works.

A program of new and recent ballets during New York City Ballet’s spring season (April 18-May 28, at the David H. Koch Theatre) is the occasion for the return of two of Alexei Ratmansky’s most striking and stylish works: “Namouna, a Grand Divertissement,” from 2010, and “Russian Seasons,” from 2008. “Namouna” is funny and weird, like a French nineteenth-century adventure fantasy, but without a story, set to sumptuous music by Édouard Lalo and filled with eccentric solos and raucous ensemble numbers. “Russian Seasons” is an enigmatic suite of folktale-like vignettes set to a song cycle by the contemporary Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov. (He also provided the music for a new Ratmansky ballet that will open on May 4.) Another program spotlights the young Justin Peck, whose recent première “The Times Are Racing” revealed a heretofore unseen rough-and-tumble style. His new ballet, opening May 12, is set to a score by the alt-rocker Sufjan Stevens. ♦